First house, decent with flat-pack and a drill, no experience beyond that. My list this year has a tiled bathroom floor and a couple of light fittings on it, plus the usual painting and filling. I am not trying to save the absolute maximum, I am trying not to make something worse and then pay twice. Where is the line for people who have been at this longer than me?
I counted hours once, properly, on a job I was proud of doing myself. Twenty-two hours across three weekends, plus about £90 of tools I have used twice since. The quote had been for a day and a half of a professional's time. On the money it was roughly a wash; on my actual life it was three weekends I do not get back. Now I DIY the things I enjoy and pay for the things I do not, and I stopped pretending it was about money.
Disagreeing gently with the strict rules. The line is not really the job type, it is whether you can undo it. Painting badly is a Saturday to fix. Cutting a pipe in the wrong place is not. So before starting anything ask what the recovery looks like if I get this half done and stop, and if the answer is 'no water until Monday', pay someone. That framing let me do far more myself than a category-based rule ever did.
The undo test is more useful to me than the list, because it accounts for the fact that I can stop and call someone halfway through a tiling job and cannot on a plumbing one.
My rule after fifteen years: I will do anything where a mistake is ugly, and I will not do anything where a mistake floods, burns or has to be signed off. That puts painting, filling, shelves, doors, flooring and basic carpentry firmly in the yes column, and puts anything behind a wall involving water or electricity in the no column. It is not about difficulty — plenty of the no-column jobs are easy — it is about the size of the downside and whether you will be able to prove it was done properly when you sell.
And in a lot of places some of those jobs are regulated regardless of your competence, with certification requirements that vary by country and even by region. Worth ten minutes finding out what applies where you are before you plan the year.
The proving-it-later point is underrated. Our buyers' surveyor asked for paperwork on work we had done ourselves and we had none, which knocked a chunk off at the last minute.
The jobs I get called to fix, in order: bad tiling, silicone, and anything where someone has drilled into something. The first two are cosmetic and cost a weekend. The third one is why I say pay for a decent detector before you pay for anything else.
Do the light fittings last, after you have done everything else, so that if you decide partway through that you would rather have an electrician you have not already made the room unusable. Order of operations saves more DIY regret than skill does.
@counter_top_carla · 2mo ago
Tiled a bathroom floor, and I would do it again, but only because I now know what I did wrong. I tiled straight onto a floor that flexed, and eighteen months later there was a crack across four tiles and grout coming out in a line. Redoing it properly with the right board underneath cost more than the original job and took a weekend I did not have. Tiling itself is not the hard part. What is under the tiles is the hard part, and nobody tells you that on the internet.
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